Random access medium-access control (MAC) protocols, such as the distributed coordinated function (DCF) in the legacy IEEE 802.11 and the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) function in high-throughput (HT) IEEE 802.11, allow stations (STAs) to share the medium without deterministic coordination. Due to the possibility of transmission collisions, which is defined as the mutually destructive effect of interference at the receiver from simultaneous transmissions, random backoff mechanisms are used in random access protocols. For example, in IEEE 802.11, each STA maintains a backoff counter that is decremented in every slot that the STA senses the medium to be idle. The counter decrement is paused if the medium is sensed to be busy. When the counter's value becomes zero, the STA (re)transmits its frame. The backoff counter is randomly uniformly selected from a range called the backoff window. This window is doubled, up to a certain maximum, every time the STA experiences a reception failure determined by lack of an acknowledgement (ACK) frame in response to its data frame transmission. In IEEE 802.11, the STA resets the backoff window to the minimum backoff window every time it transmits the data frame and receives the corresponding ACK frame successfully.